Conner Contemporary Art is pleased to announce two concurrent solo exhibitions featuring new video by Janet Biggs (New York, NY) and performance and sculpture by Wilmer Wilson IV (Washington, DC). "Kawah Ijen" is Biggs' second solo exhibition with the gallery; "Domestic Exchange" is Wilson's inaugural exhibition with the gallery.

JANET BIGGS:
Conner Contemporary Art is delighted to present Janet Biggs's "Kawah Ijen" featuring a new multi-channel installation - "A Step on the Sun"- and a single-channel video by the same name. Biggs has achieved international renown working in extreme on-site conditions and maximizing cinematic techniques to create stunning interpretations of human strength in extraordinary environments.

In "A Step On the Sun," the artist focuses on hardships overcome by a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano, in the East Java province of Indonesia. Biggs's video centers around a crater situated almost two miles above sea level, which houses the world's largest sulfuric lake. We watch as the miner collects hardened sulfur crystals and packs them into a basket. Amid clouds of toxic sulfur dioxide gas, he carries heavy loads up a steep, rocky path from the crater floor to the rim, then to a distant weigh-station. The footage confronts us with a provocative mixture of natural beauty and human exploitation.

Biggs subverts documentary structure, portraying co-existing but colliding worlds in a faceted narrative wherein she juxtaposes the sulfur mining scenes with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration photos of an experimental weather balloon launch. The pictorial array is accompanied by a soundtrack of noises recorded inside the volcanic mine which is punctuated by cello and violin passages commissioned by the artist. "A Step on the Sun" adds a poetic voice to ongoing discussions on bio-politics and global-humanism.

Janet Biggs will lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on Thursday, March 15, 2012, at 8pm.

Biggs work may be seen currently in "Videonale: Dialog in Contemporary Video Art", at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts through February 2012. The artist has had recent solo exhibitions at The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL and will show at the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal in the Fall of 2012.

Additional information may be found at: http://www.connercontemporary.com.
For further information or images, please contact the gallery @ 202-588-8750 or info@connercontemporary.com.

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